I am thinking of getting a new laptop. I usualyl just play Football manager and watch/ stream a lot of tv shows and movies.
What things in the spec should I look out for? All I understand is the hard drive capacity and the Ram.
Football Manager doesn't require a high end graphics card, but it can really eat up RAM and CPU usage if you start adding leagues. Look for a quad-core CPU (i7) and at least 8 Gb of RAM.
EDIT -- Sorry, didn't really read your second line. Here's what to look for:
CPU:
The brains of your computer. The "cores" mean how many it has, most CPUs for notebooks these days are dual or quad core. Intel does have some with "hyper-threading", meaning that for programs designed to use that, each core acts as two.
Intel's current generation is called Haswell (the chips' names all start with a 4: 4xxx, the previous generation all start with a 3: 3xxx, etc), and is noted for longer battery life. Intel's processors are called i3, i5, i7 (dual core, dual with HT, and quad core for the most part), though they do have lower end processors too (avoid them unless you just want to do basic email/office tasks).
AMD has CPUs too, but they are nowhere near as good as Intel.
GPU:
Handles all graphics. Intel's processors have "integrated" graphics (HD 3000, HD 4000, and up to Iris Pro) that can do some gaming at low quality settings at the very least. I would avoid anything below HD 4000, though. Iris Pro (HD 5000 and up) is very nice, but rare and expensive. If you have to go for Intel graphics, pick between HD 4000, HD 4400, or HD 4600.
Nvidia has the GeForce lineup of "dedicated" graphics cards. Current mobile generation is the 7xxM. You will see they split between GT and GTX cards (the latter are heavy duty gaming cards, starting at GTX 760M). Anything from a GT 730M and up will do you nicely, or a GT640M from last generation (avoid earlier generations, because they probably come paired with an older CPU too). Lower end cards use DDR3 RAM, higher end use much faster GDDR5 (some NVIDIA mid level cards like the 650M or the 750M can use either, which leads to very different results). Nvidia has a tool called Optimus, that automatically shifts between Intel's integrated and the GeForce graphics, to save batery life. Very, very useful.
AMD has the Radeon series of dedicated mobile cards. They can go toe-to-toe with Nvidia, but they don't handle battery life very well. Stick with Intel if you want just FM, or Nvidia if you hope for more games.
You will notice I haven't been too kind to AMD overall. It's just that when it comes to the mobile sector, AMD just dropped the ball and doesn't have as many financial resources as a monster like Intel does. They do make crack graphics cards for desktop computers, though. Here's hoping they can apply that to the laptop sector before it becomes an Intel/Nvidia duopoly.
